Looking to grow your Facebook following? Of course you are. No matter how many fans your page has, a few more could never hurt. More fans mean more people engaging with your brand when they spend time on social media, and high totals look impressive to new visitors and hospital stakeholders alike.

Growing your Facebook page doesn’t happen overnight, but following best practices can help expedite the process. If you’re not already doing all of these, they could be just what you need to stand out online.

Social media is such a big part of digital marketing that managing it can quickly overwhelm even the savviest hospital marketer. It’s bad enough if you’re only using Facebook and Twitter—throw Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google+ into the mix and you might start pulling your hair out.

Fortunately, there are many tools out there specifically designed to help you manage your social media presence, but picking one can be a daunting task all by itself. The folks over at Seriously Social and G2 Crowd put together the following infographic to make that decision a bit easier. Whether you’re looking for a social media management tool for the first time or you’re unhappy with the tool you’re using and you’re wondering what else is available, it’s got all the basic info you need to get started.

Google and Twitter created a new partnership in February 2015. This deal has implications for all health care marketers.

Prior to this new partnership Google was indexing only a very small percentage of the tweets in Twitter’s “fire hose” and it was indexing them slowly. At this time Google was “scraping” Tweets from Twitter—a slow and computer-intensive process. With this new partnership Twitter is sending all Tweets directly to Google to index, making the transfer of data orders of magnitude faster.

When the new partnership started in February, tweets were only being displayed on Google searches conducted on mobile devices but in August the partnership expanded so searches from the desktop were included.

For a while, the mere presence of a hospital on social media was enough to stand out. Now, almost everyone is on Facebook and Twitter, and more and more hospitals are jumping on Instagram, Pinterest, even Periscope. You won’t get noticed if you’re doing the same things as everyone else.

Fortunately, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Here are some creative ways hospitals and health systems are using social media these days that you can use as models at your own hospital.

Another social app has dropped its signature characteristic in favor of functionality. Not long after Snapchat started letting users tap once to view messages instead of tapping and holding, Instagram rolled out an update that lets users upload portrait and landscape photos to the app.

With nearly 20 percent of all photos uploaded to Instagram having rectangular aspect ratios, the change is a welcome one for the app’s 300 million users. As hospital marketers, it gives you more flexibility with your photos and videos, whether you’re paying for ads or building your reach organically.

Social media marketing can be a great way for marketing local businesses to attract customers and build brand awareness.

Many local businesses already conduct social media marketing campaigns on Facebook. While most business owners are familiar with or have at least heard of Pinterest, many are still in the dark about the details of using it for their marketing.

Pinterest is designed to work as an online cork board for consumers. Users can “pin” photos from practically any website in the world to their online “boards”. These virtual cork boards are then displayed to the user’s followers. Some consumers also share their Pinterest boards publicly, meaning that almost anyone with Internet access can view them.

For Facebook users frustrated with their news feeds, last week’s announcement that they can now choose who they “See First” when they visit the site was a welcome one.

The new feature is only available for iPhone users right now, but it’ll be available for Android and web users soon. It builds upon the “balanced” news feed algorithm that rolled out a few months ago, finally giving users direct control over the people and pages they actually want to see. For hospital marketers, this change could be a real opportunity to reach patients and caregivers in your community with the information they need.

When it comes to social media, marketers everywhere want to know how to measure the return on their investment.

88 percent of the more than 3,700 marketers surveyed in Social Media Examiner’s 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report listed social media ROI as one of their biggest challenges, its fifth year in a row as a top concern.

If you’re reading this and you’re not already on Pinterest, you’re probably wondering how on earth you’re supposed to keep track of yet another social network with your busy schedule.

Fortunately, once you’ve gotten the initial setup out of the way, Pinterest is pretty easy to manage, and being an early adopter is a great way to make your hospital stand out from its competition. With 70 million users, Pinterest is far from a new kid on the block—but many brands that are active on Facebook and Twitter have yet to take the leap. That leaves an opportunity for your hospital to open that door and reach an untapped audience in a unique way.